Reading, Writing, and Revolution on Our College Campuses

It’s official: Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, is jumping on the anti-Trump bandwagon, sponsoring a workshop to train students in activism against the new president and his administration.

Parents of students who attend should certainly know their tuition money is going toward this endeavor, which is sponsored by the university’s program in gender, sexuality, and feminist studies.

One 1973 Duke graduate is saddened by the university’s out-and-out commitment to progressive ideals. “Founded by Methodists and Quakers, this university was supposed to offer the best education possible for young minds,” the Charlotte, North Carolina, resident told LifeZette. “I often wonder what they [the founders] would think about the knee-jerk activism and total hysteria going on today.”

Mandy Carter, an LGBTQA activist and co-founder of the National Black Justice Coalition, will lead the Feb. 15 training session, which is entitled, “Ideas for Activism in the Time of Trump.”

Topics will include: “Understanding the importance of the changing of hearts and minds and the changing of public policy in social justice movements,” and “How our North Carolina Moral Monday Movement can be a model of a diverse coalition that brings together social justice people to take a stand against the Trump Administration,” according to the workshop’s Facebook page.

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Duke is apparently fully committed to promoting identity issues, even at the law school — which one would assume is teaching law. Carter reminded students on her Facebook page last week not to miss this past Thursday’s event at the school, which was called, “Intersectionality and the Black Lives Matter Movement.”

Next week’s “Ideas for Activism in the Time of Trump” training is using guidelines from the liberal activism site Indivisibleguide.com, whose press page reveals how much support it has received from mainstream liberal media, including MSNBC, Newsweek, The New York Times, and Fast Company.

Calling themselves “angelic troublemakers” on their site, the team at Indivisibleguide.com notes they have taken a page from the playbook of the national organizational strategies of the Tea Party movement.

Sample call scripts on the website include notes on what a determined liberal can say when calling an elected representative to oppose Steve Bannon, the president’s chief White House adviser:

Staffer: “Thank you for calling! Senator/Representative Bob supports the president’s move to reorganize the permanent membership of the National Security Council.”

Caller: “That’s terrible. What that means is Senator/Representative Bob is choosing politics over national security. It means that Steve Bannon, rather than the director of National Intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will be making life-and-death decisions for millions of service members and intelligence agents around the world. Does the Senator/Representative really believe that Steve Bannon should be helping [to] make our most consequential national security decisions over the next four years?”

This new program comes on the heels of the Duke administration’s late-January vow to protect international students in the wake of the president’s travel ban from countries that may pose a risk to Americans.

“Duke University is committed to, and is greatly enriched by, the open exchange of students, scholars and ideas from all over the globe,” read a statement by Duke University President Richard Brodhead and provost Sally Kornbluth, reported the Charlotte Observer. “We are deeply concerned about the well-being of students, faculty and staff who may be impacted by the policies that have now been put in place, and will join with the rest of higher education to bring these concerns to the attention of policymakers and the public.”

One would hope Duke is deeply concerned about tuition-paying families who are shelling out over $50,000 a year for lessons to their students on progressive pushback.

Far-left liberals continue to indulge in hysteria over everything Trump says or does. But for a university to sponsor such events is further evidence that liberals at the helm of many venerated American institutions of higher learning cannot be trusted to present a balanced worldview to their student body.